DIED 2005
FOR SOME YEARS THERE was a saint in the town of Glen Rock, a young house painter with liver cancer. Just a few years earlier he’d been a badass teenage alcoholic, a two-bit dealer. Then he sold dope to a kid who OD’d. His heart on fire, he turned around and never turned back. Long before he learned of the disease that would kill him at twenty-five, he’d taken an oath: if he could help you, he would.
Though he performed his good deeds in the most unassuming way possible, people said his name with a certain awe. So when my son was just fourteen and getting in deeper trouble every day, I sent a message through a mutual friend, as if calling on the local superhero. He showed up in his tune-blasting Honda Accord and took my son to the sushi restaurant, where they ate Hollywood rolls and talked for a while.
One thing he explained that night, my son told me in the car as we drove home from the funeral, is how you know you are in trouble. It is not when you get caught, not when your parents find out, not when the cops come and things fall apart. It’s when you are going to hang with your friends, and you realize you are looking forward to the high more than the people. Stop right there. You have already begun to sell your soul: to trade good for easy, real for fast, sharp for blurred, a bad deal you will rush to make again and again.
Just before we went to Paris that summer, we visited him on a hospital bed set up in his parents’ living room. He was barely breathing. When he realized who I was, he apologized and said he didn’t think he was going to be able to make the house-sitting gig we had discussed. Although he didn’t rule it out entirely.